Hi,
I've been following D development for quite a bit of years now
and it have always been the case that Linux was a second (or even
third) class citizen in D-Lang world.
I've always wondered when D is going to mature and gain more
popularity and always attributed the problems with D catching up
mostly for two things:
* that it's was essentially developed by one man only;
* that it neglected Linux;
The first issue have changed some while ago, and I was very happy
to hear that finally Walter somewhat embraced more distributed
and open development model. "D on github? Hell must have frozen
over." -- I thought. And I think everyone could quickly see the
results. Each of the latest releases seem like a big leap
forward, not just small set improvements.
But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can
generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time pending
issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the Ubuntu
repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the impression
is the same: D is Windows-centric.
It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric,
because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows
developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux devs.
And after all this years, D community is mostly Windows-centric.
Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am guessing, I may be
wrong.
Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and
want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in D,
I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library
incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of
languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go,
which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both
of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows
later.
So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: please
install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe Fedora too
and see for yourself is your project is easy to install and
working each time you release it.
In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long
lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac
world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact
is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and risk
devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them, just like
Open, Collaborative development model and you'll quickly see a
lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes and buzz. :)
PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better and
more impressive then it used to be.
